Magical Five, Plus Minus 2

EdSurge has a monthly newsletter, The Top Five, and CNN has a daily 5 Things. I love reading them both. Both curate for me interesting articles I don’t have the time to comb the internet for myself. There is something magical about not going beyond that number 5, it seems.

Maybe you have heard of or read George Miller’s seminal article, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information; and that due to the limits of our short-term memory (“the span of immediate memory”) 7 items is the optimum length to include if we want to facilitate retention. So EDUCAUSE has their series of 7 Things You Should Know… And “Top 5” or “5 Things” would fall within that bewitching 7.

But learning is such a complex event, that choosing an optimum number to facilitate learning just unveils but an infinitesimal bit of the myriad dimensions of this allegedly “black box” of learning. The human mind likes to look for patterns and being offered an advance organizer helps us to learn better. It means our minds can begin to prepare for the forthcoming bits of information we’ll be receiving that might extend our existing mental models. For example, I often sit in the church pews wondering what the sermon is about (no disrespect to any preacher, I can cite examples from other domains too!) and often ask my husband how many points the preacher had mentioned. Did he number his points? It seems I missed his first or second point? When presenters do not offer me advance organizers, I’m annoyed. I drift off more easily.

Like Sheldon, maybe I need things to be made whole and to have neat containers!